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Updated: May 19, 2026

Ion Exchange Chromatography (IEX) Coupled to Multi-angle Light Scattering (MALS) for Protein Separation and Characterization
Published on: April 5, 2019
Online coupling of size-exclusion chromatography and IR spectroscopy to correlate molecular weight with chemical
Timo F Beskers1, Thorsten Hofe, Manfred Wilhelm
1Institute for Chemical Technology and Polymer Chemistry, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Engesserstraße 18,Karlsruhe, Germany.
Abstract:
The determination of molecular weight and correlated chemical composition is of major interest for the advanced analysis of copolymers, blends, or unknown samples. In this work, we present a new way of online coupling IR spectroscopy and SEC to achieve a chemically sensitive, universally applicable SEC detector. Our method overcomes the limitations of existing spectroscopy-SEC combinations. We solved the major problems, like huge intensity of solvent signals (polymer concentration in detector <1 g L(-1) ) and short measuring time (<30 s), by recording the IR spectra with fully optimized sensitivity and by following mathematical solvent suppression. The measuring time for a certain S/N was reduced in several optimization steps by a factor of more than 70 000. The resulting sensitivity allows online coupled IR-SEC measurements.
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